2/9/2005- A Lowcountry winter evening

Last Saturday sunset, I splashed the Walker Bay and headed far up Butler Creek, into the deep interior marshland of abandoned ricefields that make up Snows Island. The ricefields are big sky country, broad sweeping vistas of water and grass outlined with brush and stunted trees, the only high ground a horizon far in the distance. “Man was here”, the ricefields say, but only in the past tense, as a memory, one transient event insignificant in the broader sweep of the relentless forces of Nature, and the passage of Time.

Long ago this entire area was virgin cypress and tupelo swamp, unsettled and wild, the domain of animals alone. Only a few Native Americans visited the area, passing through on their annual migration to and from the coast. None chose to live here, they preferred the better land farther upriver, away from the vagaries of tides and floods and the creatures that thrive in a half-submerged world. Then came European man, and, being of a different mindset, he saw and coveted and conquered, bending and shaping the land to his will. The former old growth swamp, sitting on it’s low-lying floodplain, was hewn and leveled and terraformed, all by hand. What an inconceivable amount of back-breaking manual labor it must have been to do this! No 9 to 5 job with a lunch hour, union wages, and the blissful relief of air-conditioning at the end of the day. It was a matter of sweat, of pain, of misery, and of plain survival, all dealt with on a day-to-day basis. We in the present can only begin to imagine what it must have been like.

It’s not just the labor, either, though clearly that can be no small consideration. It’s that they did this labor in an environment best suited for breeding malarial mosquitos, giant alligators, and every variety of poisonous snake extant on the North American continent. Venture into one of the Lowcountry swamps sometime, and it will quickly become apparent that the first person to think “We can clear this, and grow crops here…” surely was insane, or visionary to an extreme. Amazingly, mans effort and determination did eventually result in a fertile rice and indigo growing area, one that was the single most prosperous part of the entire human world in that time. Standing out on a hump of an earthen dike made by these people from our far past, I thought about what was involved in doing the work they did, clearing the swamps and turning the land into watery farms.

Cypress and tupelo aren’t just normal trees; they are tough and resilent enough to form a barrier that keeps the eroding edge of a continent from sloughing off into the sea. The ground they put their roots into is mostly water; where one season brings the flood and freshet, another brings hurricanes and tropical storms. Clearing away a half-sunk forest of trees that hold the edge of the continent stable in disregard of the ravages of the nearby ocean is an endeavour that is beyond imagining. Yet clear it these men did, miles and square miles of swampy bottomland, using nothing more than hand tools and raw muscle. They so changed the face of the Earth in this region that now, over 100 years later, it seems that the land has only begun the slow process of reverting back to its natural state.

Even though this reversion seems to have just begun, when you go out into the ricefields now, long after the work of those men was completed, you start to understand this: Through it all, Nature and Time have watched, waiting, knowing that as always, man would eventually move on. In these ricefields man has moved on, leaving behind only an eroded legacy of contorted, unnaturally shaped earth, and some winding waterways. The ricefields, these monumental realizations of mans aspiration and work, are slowly, inexorably collapsing back into the swamp that they came from. The efforts of man may seem mighty when viewed through the backwards-telescope vision of our lifetimes, but. in reality, they fall far short of permanence and greatness.

Nowadays the ricefields are mostly quiet and unsettled, visited by few humans, relied upon as a means of living by none. Mornings and evenings in the cooler months, you may hear the sharp bark of a duck hunters shotgun, or the whiny growl of an outboard engine buzzing up a creek over there, somewhere, out of view. In the summer months the ricefields are far more populated by mankind, as humans take their ski boats and jonboats out into the creeks for relief from the heat. But almost any time of the year, as the sun sets and the big sky above darkens, the presence of man fades away from the ricefields, leaving it to those who live there. I sat there for a while that evening-night, just watching and listening, observing the wildlife in wonderment and awe.

Butler Creek

It’s too cold this time of year for the frogs who do their best to be the loudest animals in the summer; in the deep of winter, it is the birds who make the most noise. Birds are everywhere, in all shapes and forms and noises, trilling, cooing, hooting, swooping. Little warblers and black thrashers flit in and out of the sawgrass, while overhead flights of duck and cormorants and solitary herons and egrets wend their way to the deeper waters out by the river. From across the creek, in the bit of water along the edge of another, hidden dike, comes the sound of wild boars, descendants of food animals for men long disappeared. The wild boars have adapted and learned to make a living out of the plants and smaller animals which live along the marsh edges. Their muffled grunts and squeals as they slosh through the shallow waters behind a wall of grass are a sharp counterpoint to the sound of other boars farther off, having a dispute over something, maybe food, maybe a she-boar. The snakes you never hear, and rarely see, although in the ricefields they are there in great numbers. Gators you can spot more readily than the snakes, and sometimes you might even hear the airy expulsion of an old bull gator warning off a younger male, or perhaps a boar.

Compared to human noises in the daytime, the marsh noises aren’t loud, it seems. But then later, when it is just you and the marshy ricefields and no other human for miles around, the noise grows, becoming a cacophony of life and celebration and survival, a wild melee of sound that has been here from long before the time of man, and will be here long after man is gone. It is the sound of life, of nature, of time greater than a single man can start to comprehend.

And, if you ask me, I’ll say that that is just how it should be.